A large portion of communication and information associated with an enterprise is often stored personal information management (PIM) and groupware systems in the form of emails, address books, task lists, and appointments, as well as other proprietary tools. At the same time, customized Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems are often needed in order to keep track of information about a specific customer and product base and to generally provide relevant business processes and scalability. Thus, organizations today must integrate groupware with more traditional information systems such as CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and others. Unfortunately, the proprietary nature of groupware and PIM systems typically makes it difficult and expensive for an enterprise to integrate their data and information into other applications.
Many business organizations implement collaboration systems such as Microsoft Exchange® Server and Lotus Domino®. Thus, employees may use the email systems such as Microsoft Outlook provided by the Microsoft Exchange server in order to communicate, keep track of appointments, contacts, tasks, meetings and generally collaborate amongst each other when working on various projects. On the other hand, portals are rapidly becoming a business users primary workspace because they can bring the right information and applications to the right people at the right time. As such, portals can provide access to account management, opportunities and prospects maintained in a customer relations database and other areas of enterprise information and content. A significant part of the functionality provided by these separate systems often overlaps thereby creating inconsistencies and missing information which can impede performance and profitability of a company. For example, an employee may schedule an appointment with a customer via the portal but that appointment may not be created or updated in the collaboration server such as Microsoft Exchange. Alternatively, if an employee uses the groupware system to create the appointment, the database accessible via the portal may not be properly updated thereby causing missing information and inaccurate views of the customer.
The result is that in many enterprises frustrated users toggle between groupware and portal applications, duplicating work and data—often with dubious integrity or efficiency. What is needed is an improved system of integration, one that would facilitate interoperability between proprietary groupware systems and various enterprise portals. For example, it may be desirable for a portal server to gain access to personal contacts, email and appointments without having to know the complexities of proprietary groupware and PIM provider. It may also be desirable for such functionality to be achieved non-intensively, without causing disruption to the rest of the enterprise.